Hello Joakim, On Fri, 07 Mar 2008 09:26:33 +0100, Joakim Larsson wrote: > I try understand how lm-sensors works and have a few questions: > > - Should I turn off the Smart Fan feature in BIOS? See my reply to your previous post. > - Is lm-sensor superiour to aht Smart Fan does? The BIOS "Smart Fan" feature can be implemented in different ways depending on the board. Sometimes it is implemented by the hardware monitoring chip itself and the BIOS is merely writing a few configuration bits to the chip. In this case it is usually compatible with lm-sensors, although not all drivers might expose the advanced features configuration interface. In your case, the w83627ehf driver exposes a lot of features so that shouldn't be a problem. But sometimes it is implemented in software as ACPI or even SMM code. In this case it will possibly conflict with lm-sensors, and you really want to disable the feature in the BIOS if you are going to use lm-sensors. So I can't tell whether lm-sensors is better than what the BIOS does on your particular board. Maybe both do exactly the same, maybe not. You can tell in which case you are by checking the files /sys/class/hwmon/hwmon0/device/pwm*_enable. The files read 1 for manual mode and 2 for automatic fan speed mode. If changing the BIOS option changes this value for at least one PWM channel, then you are certainly in case #1 above, i.e. the BIOS merely changes the chip configuration and the regulation is done all in hardware. If the files read 1 all the time, then you are most likely in case #2. > - Is having multiple brands of harddisks in a system a problem, do they > have built in sensors? lm-sensors doesn't support hard-disk drive temperature sensors at all at the moment. -- Jean Delvare
